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Libya was a smashing success and we were loved by all, today they are an example of the perfect middle eastern democracy with freedom for all.

Don'tcha just love it?
You are so correct! Can't wait for WW3 to start over the mess in the Middle East especially with O's involvement on "our" behalf ... can you?

Sonna ...

The current CinC cant be trusted to tie his own shoes without fucking it up.

Or to be precise:

He needs full radar support, three sets of Taccom computers, full backup gear, three hunting dogs asnd an inertial tracking and triangulation system to find his own ass.

On a GOOD day.

Ha! Ha! And without Valerie Jarett telling him what to do, as Mr. ABC would say ... "He wouldn't know whether to sh*t or wind his watch!"

And while I'm in here, Sonna ... the unforgiveable shooting death of Christopher Lane, by those three teenage sub-humans, absolutely sickens me.

We Americans are not all like that. Many of us still have respect for human life. Unfortunately, our once held morals and values in this country, are quickly being quashed, and met with outright disapproval by those in this administration.

And while I'm in here, Sonna ... the unforgiveable shooting death of Christopher Lane, by those three teenage sub-humans, absolutely sickens me.

We Americans are not all like that. Many of us still have respect for human life. Unfortunately, our once held morals and values in this country, are quickly being quashed, and met with outright disapproval by those in this administration.

My sincere condolences to his grieving family and friends.

~ ABC

My thanks. I dont know the family myself, but from me at least, it is much appreciated.

Libya was shooting fish in a barrel, a country with a large ground army but no truly modern ADA weapons, and with all its cities concentrated in a littoral strip of largely-uninhabitable desert, linked by one major coastal highway like Chistmas tree lights, adjacent to an ocean controlled by us and our allies for nearly 70 years and within an easy unrefueled hop from NATO air and sea bases. Syria is none of those things, the logistics of sustained operations against her are incredibly burdensome and the price any ally in the region will ultimately pay for taking sides in this or supporting us against the Syrian regime is incalculable.

Also, Qaddafi had been behaving himself, at least as far as destabilizing the region. He'd taken the lesson of what happened to Saddam to heart, and was concentrating on keeping himself immersed in drugs, girls and propaganda photo-ops. Taking him out served no purpose, except to empower the Muslim Brotherhood. Now, am I glad tht Qaddafi died a violent, horrific death, after all of the horrors that he inflicted? Well, yeah. But if the cost of that was creating an overtly Islamist state with a mandate to export jihad, then it wasn't worth it.

I somewhat disagree with you regarding the logistics. The US Mediterranean fleet has the same access to Syria's coastal areas as we did with Libya's. In addition, we can operate out of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey (and the Turks will support taking out Assad). However, Syria's air defense assets are far greater than Libya's, and any air attacks do entail far greater risks.

In addition, if we do succeed in overthrowing Assad, we are almost certainly going to abet the rise of a radical Sunni state under the Muslim Brotherhood/al Qaeda. Strategically, that is a very bad move. OTOH, if Assad holds on, he maintains the Iranian's control of Lebanon and strengthens their hand in the Middle East and globally, and let's remember that Iran is no longer simply a regional threat. Eliminating their strongest regionally ally, and their land link to their next strongest, Hezbollah, is a tempting strategic goal.

Ultimately, the best thing that we can do is provide the rebels with just enough equipment to hold their own, but not enough to win. Prolonging the war is the best answer.

Originally Posted by Bailey

Why are we getting involved? Both sides are trash and won't help us in any event. I say lets feed them some more chemical weapons so they can kill each other more.

I'd avoid giving either side chemical weapons. Assad already has them, and if al Qaeda gets them, they'll just use them against us. Better to provide a limited air defense capability, which can permit them to set up a safe haven, and keep the war going.

Also, Qaddafi had been behaving himself, at least as far as destabilizing the region. He'd taken the lesson of what happened to Saddam to heart, and was concentrating on keeping himself immersed in drugs, girls and propaganda photo-ops. Taking him out served no purpose, except to empower the Muslim Brotherhood. Now, am I glad tht Qaddafi died a violent, horrific death, after all of the horrors that he inflicted? Well, yeah. But if the cost of that was creating an overtly Islamist state with a mandate to export jihad, then it wasn't worth it.

I somewhat disagree with you regarding the logistics. The US Mediterranean fleet has the same access to Syria's coastal areas as we did with Libya's. In addition, we can operate out of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey (and the Turks will support taking out Assad). However, Syria's air defense assets are far greater than Libya's, and any air attacks do entail far greater risks.

In addition, if we do succeed in overthrowing Assad, we are almost certainly going to abet the rise of a radical Sunni state under the Muslim Brotherhood/al Qaeda. Strategically, that is a very bad move. OTOH, if Assad holds on, he maintains the Iranian's control of Lebanon and strengthens their hand in the Middle East and globally, and let's remember that Iran is no longer simply a regional threat. Eliminating their strongest regionally ally, and their land link to their next strongest, Hezbollah, is a tempting strategic goal.

Ultimately, the best thing that we can do is provide the rebels with just enough equipment to hold their own, but not enough to win. Prolonging the war is the best answer.

They are all valid considerations, I expect we just weight them somewhat differently. And it's true that compared to Afghanistan, almost nothing is as logistically-expensive, we can essentially do anything anywhere as long as we're willing to spend enough money and effort to do it. I see Turkey's and Jordan's support as one of those things that may cause more problems in the long run than they fix in the present, much like the Kaiser's spymasters ferreting Lenin into Russia. Especially so in the case of Turkey, which proved a totally-unreliable asset in OIF despite wanting to be pro-Western on alternate weeks, and which still faces a long-term problem with a growing Islamist movement that isn't going to be helped at all by assisting the West against other Muslims, even ones they actually hate...because it will ultimately go against us as the imams and mullahs relate it to their target population. After all, what got Osama thinking about the West as his main enemy, after being a fellow-traveler against the Soviets in the Afghan insurgency, was the fact that in attacking Saddam in Gulf I, we based ourselves in Saudi Arabia, desecrating (As he saw it) Holy ground. I know you're fully aware of how Black September came about, so I won't belabor that with regard to Jordan, but suffice to say there are going to be huge unintended consequences, mostly bad, down the road for any regime that physically supports us in directly attacking Syria, and so ultimately for our regional interests and relations. It will be one of those situations like telling a friend his wife is cheating on him...you (We) will eventually end up being the bad guy in the eyes of the one you are trying to help.

Don't even get me started on Libya and what a pointless, press-driven, President-in-domestic-trouble, unnecessary bloodbath that was...much like Klintoon's Kosovo Killzone, there were two equally-vile and mutually-atrocity-prone groups, but since the misery of the side getting its ass kicked draws cable news like shit draws flies, the press and Kennedy-era relics like McCain were all for throwing the fight the other way, ending up with just as many dead as there would have been if we had left them to their own devices, just different ones.

In the case of Kosovo, a lot of the pressure was driven by the Serbs having proven to be such immense assholes in a sea of assholes during the Yugoslavian Civil War, and our intervention in Kosovo was a belated attempt to look like we did something positive beyond barely managing to keep Wesley Clark from starting a war with Russia. Moe the Q's past history had kind of the same effect in Libya, even though he had been compliant with Western demands and refrained from involvement in terror or nukes after Saddam got spanked, we still went after him when we had a flimsy excuse to do so.

Now just to inject a little Realpolitik and wargaming the other side into this, Moe actually makes a fantastic case in point to both the Norks and Iran that there really isn't any value to them in dropping their WMD programs, since history would seem to make it clear that we will still try to take them down later when they are in a weaker position, even if they do everything we ask now.

Also, Qaddafi had been behaving himself, at least as far as destabilizing the region. He'd taken the lesson of what happened to Saddam to heart, and was concentrating on keeping himself immersed in drugs, girls and propaganda photo-ops. Taking him out served no purpose, except to empower the Muslim Brotherhood. Now, am I glad tht Qaddafi died a violent, horrific death, after all of the horrors that he inflicted? Well, yeah. But if the cost of that was creating an overtly Islamist state with a mandate to export jihad, then it wasn't worth it.

I somewhat disagree with you regarding the logistics. The US Mediterranean fleet has the same access to Syria's coastal areas as we did with Libya's. In addition, we can operate out of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey (and the Turks will support taking out Assad). However, Syria's air defense assets are far greater than Libya's, and any air attacks do entail far greater risks.

In addition, if we do succeed in overthrowing Assad, we are almost certainly going to abet the rise of a radical Sunni state under the Muslim Brotherhood/al Qaeda. Strategically, that is a very bad move. OTOH, if Assad holds on, he maintains the Iranian's control of Lebanon and strengthens their hand in the Middle East and globally, and let's remember that Iran is no longer simply a regional threat. Eliminating their strongest regionally ally, and their land link to their next strongest, Hezbollah, is a tempting strategic goal.

Ultimately, the best thing that we can do is provide the rebels with just enough equipment to hold their own, but not enough to win. Prolonging the war is the best answer.

I'd avoid giving either side chemical weapons. Assad already has them, and if al Qaeda gets them, they'll just use them against us. Better to provide a limited air defense capability, which can permit them to set up a safe haven, and keep the war going.

I agree with you, just bottle them up and let them kill each other. No one that emerges out of this conflict is going to be friends to us.

Syria's air defense network is definitely much more advanced then Libya's, but if Israel treats it with relative impugnity, then I have little doubt that we can as well. They don't even have access to stealth aircraft.

B-2's and cruise missiles will be a first strike option targetting their ops centers that control their air defences, that'll greatly reduce the risk to whatever follows.

In most sports, cold-cocking an opposing player repeatedly in the face with a series of gigantic Slovakian uppercuts would get you a multi-game suspension without pay.

In hockey, it means you have to sit in the penalty box for five minutes.

I can see that the toll on the people of Syria from this civil war is very high. I just don 't see that there's much that we and our allies can do to make it any better. Pretty much anything we do will result in more civilian bloodshed.

Syria's air defense network is definitely much more advanced then Libya's, but if Israel treats it with relative impugnity, then I have little doubt that we can as well. They don't even have access to stealth aircraft.

B-2's and cruise missiles will be a first strike option targetting their ops centers that control their air defences, that'll greatly reduce the risk to whatever follows.

I'm not so sure. Israel's penetration is limited to quick in-and-outs and highly-choreographed special operations to go after deep, very high-value targets, it's not routine freedom of maneuver. While the Syrian Air Force isn't much of a threat, the ADA system is, and the Russians have done their best to make it better and more resilient after each one of those Israeli penetrations. If the Syrians succeed in taking out a single B2, they're going to look like the winners.